Suchergebnisse

This article examines the social and historical effects of laughter as stimulated by and depicted in Our Boys in the crucial years leading up to the Anglo-Irish War. Our Boys was a juvenile periodical edited by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, who aimed to teach Irish youth how to behave and articulate their interests within the terms of reference established by nationalist, Catholic discourse. Laughter was provoked and represented in Our Boys with this objective in mind and thus came to possess a formative and ideological dimension. The investigation focuses on how laughter in the periodical constructed both ideologies and subjectivities.

This paper aims to analyse a largely uncharted topic, i.e. the representation of Ireland's struggle for political and cultural self-determination in the nationalist press for Irish youth. In particular, I will examine four papers (Our Boys, Fianna, Young Ireland, and St. Enda's), which represented the various nuances within the ranks of Irish nationalism. Combining literary and historical interests, I will devote my attention to the editorials and literary contributions published in the 1910s and 1920s to illustrate how these juvenile periodicals engaged their readership in a discussion on the necessity of Home Rule and Ireland's cultural independence. Textual attention to the rhetorical and literary strategies adopted by the contributors helps to expose the nuances and shifts in the Irish nationalists' view on the issue, and how nationalist ideas were repackaged for a youthful audience. Moreover, since the four papers were meant as home-grown substitutes for the examples of British popular culture such as the Boys' Own Paper, their analysis will cast light on the nationalists' yearning for the development and success of truly Irish popular culture among the youngsters. The Irish periodicals waged a battle against their British counterparts — a battle which Ireland's youth was incited to fight.

"Liam O'Flaherty's numerous stories dealing with animals are generally considered his best artistic efforts. Scholars have highlighted how he humbled anthropocentric pride and even effaced the narrator and the human point of view from them. My contention, however, is that these stories can also be interpreted as O'Flaherty's literary meditation on the absence of 'good discontinuities' between humans and animals, and on the importance of constructing the human/animal encounter on the acceptance of the existence of an interspecies communion. In his stories, humans do not necessarily possess something that animals lack, such as the capability of feeling compassion. Humans often fail to have compassion for other animals or human beings, for they deny that a communion obtains among all the living. These humans are capable of taking delight in another's suffering and so disrupt both their equilibrium with potentially negative consequences and the present 'ecological equilibrium', which has to be restored. Hence, O'Flaherty's short stories can be seen as earlier literary responses to contemporary works on human/animal ethics and genuine ethe of care (Derrida; Nussbaum; Wolfe), which will be discussed here together with selected empirical studies on the same subject (de Waal; Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas). Keywords: Liam O'Flaherty, animal stories, compassion, existential suffering, human-animal distinction "